Trump Compares Pelosi’s ‘Crumbs’ to Hillary’s ‘Deplorables’

President Donald Trump compared House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s putdown of tax cut bonuses as “crumbs” to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterization of her rival’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables.”

“When I came into this beautiful building, just a little while ago, one of the people said, ‘You know, I just got a check. And I have $221 more than I had last year at this time in my envelope,'” Trump told attendees at a GOP retreat Thursday in West Virginia. “And then we got hit with these corporations giving tremendous bonuses to everybody that Nancy Pelosi called ‘crumbs.’

“That was a bad — that could be like ‘deplorable,’ does that make sense?” Trump continued. “Deplorable and crumbs? Those two words — they seem to have a resemblance. I hope it has the same meaning. But she called it crumbs when people are getting $2,000 and $3,000 and $1,000. That’s not crumbs. That’s a lot of money.”

Pelosi made headlines after Congress passed the historic Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. She compared the bonuses and pay raises hundreds of companies gave employees to “crumbs” during a January 11 press conference, dismissing the money as “pathetic” and “insignificant.”

Afterward, Pelosi doubled down on the comment during another press conference, saying the top 1 percent of Americans were getting a “big bonanza” and a “banquet” while middle-class and poor Americans were settling for a “crumb.”

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Hillary Clinton, for her part, suffered intense backlash after she dismissed “half of Trump’s supporters” as “the basket of deplorables” during a September 2016 fundraiser in New York City.

“You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables,'” Clinton said with condescension. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Clinton’s critics called her out of touch after she used the “basket of deplorables” slur — and many of Trump’s supporters defiantly embraced the term and referred to themselves as “deplorables.”

Now Trump and Republicans have panned Pelosi as similarly out of touch. But that hasn’t stopped Pelosi from doubling down even further on her “crumbs” remark. During a recent appearance captured on video and uploaded to YouTube Thursday by the America Rising PAC, Pelosi once again used the term.

Related: Trump Boom Grows to 250 Companies That Are Giving Tax Cut Bonuses to Workers

“While [Republicans] give banquets to the … high end, to the top 1 percent of corporate America, they’re giving — I say crumbs, they mock me in ads for saying that — compared to the banquet they give at the high end.”

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The president also criticized Democratic lawmakers for refusing to stand or clap on Tuesday night during his State of the Union address when he touted the historically low unemployment rates of the African-American and Hispanic communities.

“And when I made that statement the other night, there was zero movement from the Democrats. They sat there, stone cold, no smile, no applause,” Trump said. “You would have thought that on that one they would have at least clapped a little bit. Which tells you perhaps they would rather see us not do well than see our country do great, and that’s not good. That’s not good. We have to change that.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage image: Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Lorie Shaull; photo credit, article image: Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)